Jacques Dutronc

Sometimes, when life just gets a bit much, I pull myself up and say…dude, you wrote a song with Françoise Hardy…

One of the demos I’d given to Etienne Daho a couple of years previously was a song called Days of Heaven. He wasn’t feeling it for himself but when Françoise Hardy was looking for songs for her album Décalages he passed it on to her and she penned new lyrics for it. And that’s how I came to write a song with Françoise Hardy.

During the preparation of Arnold’s album I was invited to the studio in Paris where she was recording. Some readers may not be altogether astonished to hear that I made an ass of myself. I was nervous, starstruck, very probably over refreshed. Françoise, of course, was all elegance and cordiality. She handed me a Fender Stratocaster, casually mentioning that she had borrowed it from her husband Jacques Dutronc, at which point I nearly dropped the thing. Most embarrassingly, I had hardly played guitar for 2 years and was completely unable to play my own song. Luckily the unfailing Xavier “Tox” Geronimi was there, and gave me that look given by natives of Brittany to convey “I got this”.